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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

The reason I love my old cheap 1080p monitors so much is because they need less organizational overhead compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc.

I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a malware analyst most of the time) I am losing my mind with all the notifications and blocking popup windows all the time. I have no idea why people are tolerating this as their work setup. It is hostile design to its users.

I use my computer to work. I don't want a computer that works me all the time.

[1] for desktop/GUI apps I use a mixture of GNOME forks and LXDE apps. Everything that makes popups when running in the background is avoided.*

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“compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc.”

counterpoint: this doesn’t appear the case with Apple, as they have defaulted their OS entirely to retina-level density now, removed subpixel rendering, and anything non-5K may look off (and you need to go through hoops to make it look well).

As such, I’m typing this in a MacBook with 3x5K displays connected.

Subpixel rendering has nothing to do with any of this: it was messing up on non-RGB pixel layout panels like VA and OLED, and it used to be a simple setting in GNOME (hidden these days unfortunately).

Still, even 5K at 27" is not without noticeable jagged edges in diagonal lines and textual characters (though I've only tried 4K at 24", but that's a similar DPI and angular resolution if at the same distance) if your visual acuity (with or without correction) is around 20/20 or better (mine is better with glasses/contacts).

I hate how the text looks with a Mac on a 4K 32" screen, let alone 4K 42" screen.

And I love my multi monitor setup, because each monitor has its own set of app, and I can remove window switching by a lot.

I put my browser on 2k monitor so no need to fight with resolution and other things

but IDE is always on 4k monitor, no scaling, slightly larger font size, so I can see more code. And all the log, and note app are on 3rd 1080p monitor.

And Wayland gnome was pretty solid for me, until recently gnome-shell eating over 2/3gb on long run. Switched to niri for the time being, which is working pretty solid.

In sway + Wayland, these UI scaling bugs are fixed

... while other bugs are introduced :-/

Can't switch because of old hardware and vulkan/mesa legacy reasons.

KDE + Wayland is fine, too... except in some Java apps and LibreOffice with its ancient crap toolkit.

Firefox, MS Edge (my MS Teams sandbox) and any GTK apps do work.

Yeah, I don't have UI scaling bugs with Niri + Wayland.

1080p is plenty for text-based work if you're not using Chinese or Japanese. It looks as sharp as 4K when you disable text anti-aliasing.

It absolutely doesn’t look as sharp as 4k, even on 22” inch screen

I've seen 4K monitors in person. Disabling anti-aliasing (with full hinting enabled) on a 1080p monitor increases text sharpness to equal that of anti-aliased text on a 4K monitor. The only drawback is that the font no longer approximates the shape of printed text. This doesn't matter except in the outlier cases of Chinese and Japanese, which use some extremely visually intricate characters.

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